Hi
@ES123456
First off, congrats on the HSF AC!
I feel you! This is very similar to my own experiences of the application season between studying and owning a couple of businesses. Unfortunately, there's no real way around the fact that these periods are exhausting and can be draining from that perspective. I also found I really had to cut out peripheral activities etc for a while to get through everything- it's never pleasant, but, in my experience, is necessary.
I can also thoroughly recommend investing in a good coffee machine... best money I've ever spent.
On a serious note, I think structuring your week as a whole is helpful as well as breaking down each day. Assuming you have a five-day working week, that would leave you two days a week that could become your AC prep days. This is where you'd focus on the substantive content of responses etc. Focus part of each day on each area of the AC (i.e., competency interview/ case study and CS interview/ (edit
scenario interview).
Within each working day, look at how you can maximise each period of that day. Personally, most days of my week are broken into 30-minute or 1-hour slots, 15-minute slots on days where I'm particularly busy. Personally, I'm a night owl, so I would tend to focus more on working late rather than being up early- if you're tired after work and have to be up for it the next day, though, you might find that sleeping early and being up early is better. Try and factor in, say, 30 mins or 1 hour before work where you can read the news/ work on an answer/ etc. In the evenings, if you've got a tendency to watch Netflix for an hour before you go to sleep, try and switch that out for something like watching the news or listening to a commercial awareness podcast (I think either
@Dheepa or
@Naomi U might be able to recommend a couple).
Depending on how you commute, there are various ways you can use your commuting time to work on your prep. There are a couple of revision card apps (e.g., Quizlet) that you can use to test yourself if you commute via public transport. If you drive, maybe switch the radio onto a news channel rather than Spotify, for example. You could even pre-record yourself speaking and then play the audio in your car to learn by hearing it.
Another thing I did was to actually look at my life as a whole and see whether there were areas that I could cut out time to make things easier for myself. For example, I cook for my fiancee and I every night- for the period we were prepping for AC's, I batch cooked lunches and dinners on a Sunday evening instead which saved me a lot of time. Maybe look at using a grocery delivery service rather than having to travel to the shops for stuff- you'd be surprised how much time you can actually make up by trying to be more efficient elsewhere.
The final thing I would mention, which helps both in respect of not overloading your brain and also actually making your responses more natural at ACs, is to not to try and learn a script. Instead, memorise the key points and examples you need to hit for each part of each answer - it gives you less substantive content to stress about memorising and also means that, in the AC, you don't seem as robotic and aren't thrown 'off script' by a follow up/ interrupting question etc which can cause you to fumble more.
Hope this helps, fingers crossed for you!
